Forced Migration

Mural on the Theme of Migration

From Watkins & Casey, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border:

The forced or sometimes chosen northward migratory path of Mexican migrants brings them back to lands that prior to 1848 were part of their country. As though caught in a reciprocal osmotic process, I have been pulled Southward over the last decade, as though a compensatory process in my own psyche and bodily presence has been activated. My pilgrimage has taken me southward in order to more fully arrive home in Santa Barbara, to have a better understanding of my neighbors and myself. It has drawn me “off-center,” and has offered me a deeper way of being at home.

I naively thought that the desperate situation I encountered in 2002 could be ameliorated through federal immigration reform, and that local and state efforts could be launched in the meantime helping those migrants now stranded in our communities due to the wall. Instead I have found myself learning about and witnessing a tragic and shameful chapter-in-the-making of American history. While my interest began with the literal wall that has been built during this period, it gradually widened to encompass the global and the local implications of this wall building…. in an age of forced migrations that are occurring across the globe, and which threaten to multiply as the number of environmental refugees soar…

Watkins, M. (2011). The shame of forcibly displacing others: 9/11 and the criminalization of immigration. American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies, 10, 2.